Ultrashort pulse propagation in multiple-grating fiber structures

We propose a multiple-grating fiber structure that decomposes an ultrashort broadband optical pulse simultaneously in both wavelength and time. As an initial demonstration, we used a transform-limited 1-ps Gaussian pulse centered at 1.55 mu;m as the ultrashort broadband input into a three-grating fiber structure and generated three output pulses separated in wavelength and time with good correlation between experimental results and simulations. This device structure can be used to generate a multiwavelength train of pulses for use in wavelength-division-multiplexed systems or to implement frequency-domain encoding of coherent pulses for optical code-division multiple access.